Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (26 page)

Gustave’s brow and eyes and
nose and moving lips.
The back of Lamb’s head.
Gray blank backdrop of a room.
Here and now.
Then and there.

On the first day of the
month of brides DeGaulle dissolved the Assembly and took off at last the mask,
revealing a second mask that was the true face of the state, the helmets and
gas masks of the CRS, black immobile plastic and metal, raccoon eyes
unblinking, the men inside just meat in rigid light-absorbing shells, violent
mollusks heaped up against our inchoate victory, that was dissolving now in
front of our eyes. We were losing the workers, who discovered after all that
they had much to lose, not just their chains: pay rises had been promised,
working hours adjusted. It was the Communists themselves who turned out to be
the most at home in the system, who prospered from permanent deferral of their
platform, itself a deferral from what Moscow pledged, what Che and Fidel in
their own reckless, ruthless beauty had seemed to promise. What remained? Only
thousands of students with no leader or plan, broken into dozens and hundreds
of groupuscules, as large as UNEF and as small as we three smoking and dreaming
in the empty flat, looking for and failing to discover our true size in the
long humid evenings, passing through empty or crowded streets where the trees
and barricades alike had been torn down. In the papers we bought and strewed
across the floor like a carpet the reflections and post-mortems were already
being disseminated, the lightning bottled for reuse by melancholics and those
who’d afterward claim to have been there. It was as if the horizon itself, the
one we’d marched for, the line that had defined the world we’d found and which
had come to seem so close, so crossable, had vanished into the sea of ordinary
life. M looked out the window, quoting T.S. Eliot to me and Charles bored and
stoned and spread out on the floor like stunned insects, lying on top of the
newspapers and posters and flyers and ashes. I would not have thought death had
undone so many. I would not have thought boredom could ever
return,
could ever become again the context and fiber of our minutes, our days. Yet it
had.

I didn’t care. M was near
me. Jules
et
Jim, Gustave and Charles.
And M.
I knew they slept together, though silently. Charles
never made a
sound,
he had left that to Simone and his
swans, to make that ugly inhuman cry echo through the wall-less flat at any
hour of the night. But M too was silent, so that I believed they might have
believed I thought them chaste, except in the morning I would see them, in the
gray cotton light of a Paris dawn, entwined naked, covered or not covered by a
sheet. Sometimes I sat in a wooden chair a few meters of and sketched them, and
left the sketches here and there in the flat, a gesture whose meaning I didn’t
care to scrutinize. M would find them and collect them; I assumed she threw
them out, but later on, after the very end, I found them coiled and tucked into
a discarded boot in the corner she’d used as a closet, fanned them out on the
floor and looked at the black charcoal streaks of bodies in the aftermath of
love. A love I bore witness to without sharing. I suppose that she did love
him, easily, the way they all did, for his beauty and arrogance; but there was
something else, a skeptical inclination of the head when I caught her sometimes
looking at him while he was speaking fervently about Marx or Godard or the
revolution, always the revolution, the center of history that had been given to
him wrapped in a bow like a present, like M herself. We shared something,
she
and me. It was her little joke to refer to us both as
les americains
; Charles would stride in
the street with his usual impatient quick steps, and M would fall behind a few
paces and take my arm, saying After all, we Americans need to stick together.
Or at the café with our copies of
Action
and
Le Monde
, with Charles cursing over the haplessness of De
Gaulle’s ministers and the perfidy of the PCF, she’d say to me, Well, Gus? We
could use the American perspective on this affair. Or the times I’d be at the
kitchen table with a piece of toast and M would appear, languid, nearly naked
in a paint-spattered shirt she’d borrowed permanently from me, because on her
it was large enough to be a dressing gown, her little hands twisting like
marionettes from the ends of rolled sleeves. She’d turn a chair around so its
back was to me and sit down, straddling it, a lock of hair lolling over one
eye, looking at me the way I’d looked at her that day and so many mornings
afterward, with a pencil or pastel in my hand. Not appraising, not judging,
merely
measuring. And I felt for once that my big flabby
body belonged somewhere, I’d lean my elbows on the table with my toast and pour
her a cup of the same crap coffee and we’d sit there, quietly, like married
people, until Charles would bring his noise and his bluster into the airspace we
called the kitchen, and the day would start again, the revolution would resume.

But these were as I say the
waning days. De Gaulle was back, a querulous and demanding voice on the radio,
and the whole city seemed to be waking from its dream. Charles, like a little
boy, fought waking. And he wasn’t the only one. Losing his audience, finding it
harder every day to rouse his cadre, each of whom little by little was finding
himself caught up once again in ordinary concerns, exams, the summer holidays,
he hectored the two of us more and more, answering the silence in M’s face and
the boredom in my own with diatribes on anarcho-syndicalism and the Communists’
betrayal of their own legacy and the misguided veneration of Trotsky—we must
get back to the first principles of Marxism-Leninism, we must mobilize our own
class privileges on behalf of the people, who do not yet realize that they are
the people, when they do it will be a terrible day for the bosses and owners
and politicians and Charles’s own father, it cannot be helped, to make an
omelet etcetera. M made a face at me when his back was turned and I tried not
to laugh but still my face was distorted and when Charles saw it he became
enraged, he pushed back from the table and shouted My God Gustave, don’t you understand
it’s all for you, you are the People, you fucking peasant, you’re the one it’s
all for, and it’s all right if you don’t care for theory but without theory
there’s no practice, you asshole, you fucking smirker, you shirker. To which
there was no defense but to raise both my palms in the air, I surrender, while
M looked up at the ceiling, stone-faced. She doesn’t understand any of it, he
grumbled to me one afternoon when M was out, she reads all the books and shouts
all the slogans but she has no feeling for it, she’s really an American, she
doesn’t believe, they’re a generation behind us at least as far as class
consciousness goes, it’s a real problem. But she goes with you to all the
demos, I said, she’s right there up front, she’s fearless, I’ve seen her.
That’s not the point, he answered, what makes me crazy is she’s there but she’s
not there, she believes but she doesn’t believe, I can feel her standing apart,
looking down on all of us, on me, on you, on herself maybe. I didn’t answer but
thought of the two of them making love, how her eyes must slide away from his,
faking it, or rather not faking it hard enough, not the orgasm but the illusion
that one is really inside the other person or has taken the other person in, is
truly with him, moved by him, rocked by him, living and dying in a single
embrace. It’s a little too obvious, isn’t it, with M, that you are not her
fantasy, her mind or something, call it soul if you like, is elsewhere,
possessed but by whom, by what. M was his lover but she was my horizon. I knew
in the breathless nights of their sex that he fucked her in vain, in herself
behind the eyes recessive and untouchable as the revolution itself. Underneath
the scorn and derision, or contrariwise the lit flame of passion, I saw something,
something tucked like a bookmark into the illuminated text of her life,
something I recognized. I saw her, how she looked at me and my pear-shaped
pullet’s body, my ill-fitting face and clothes, my Frankenstein freakishness,
and recoiled in fear and recognition at something that reminded her of
herself
. The two of us were pushed or pushed ourselves to
the side of whatever river was flowing, the current caught us up but only took
us so far, on the banks of the waters of Babylon we stood or knelt and watched,
only watched and witnessed. Charles, protagonist, could not understand us,
tried to bring us under the umbrella of his own fierce subjectivity, enroll us
as players in the drama of his own hang-ups, which he of course thought were
universal, those were the only terms by which a mind so educated could play the
hero’s role, he had to be the hero for everybody, he wanted to be my hero, M’s
hero, and could not. For myself I wanted only to paint her, to reach beyond my
own manifest limitations and touch something as genuine and as elusive as my
own soul, the flicker at the corners of her eyes, her mouth, looking back
boldly at me when I sketched her naked. Naked! No woman was ever less naked, or
more like a nude, than M in our occasional sessions, when Charles was out or
asleep, sessions never longer than a half hour or so, whenever the mood struck
her to discard whatever she was wearing and stand or kneel or squat or recline
for me, wherever she was in the flat, and I followed after with whatever tools
I could scrounge—a bit of newsprint, a stub of charcoal, if I was lucky some
pastels. Always I worked swiftly, trying to capture what seemed most ephemeral
in the pose, the breath, the tug of her upper ribcage under the slope of her
breasts, a lock of hair over her left eye that she blew away, impishly. Then we
would hear Charles on the stairs and languidly, without hurry, she would roll
away to the bathroom or to cover herself while I finished the sketch. I did not
bother to conceal these sketches from
Charles,
he
looked at them sometimes, cup of coffee in hand, without comment, an amused
expression on his face. I was no threat to him. And sometimes she looked with
him, poker faced, leaning on his shoulder. He’d gesture at one of the pictures,
at the thickness and coarseness of the jawline, or the way one eye was
manifestly larger than the other.

Look at Picasso, he’d say.
Look at you, Picasso’s mistress.

He makes me so ugly, she’d
murmur, as though in agreement.

She went on posing for me,
a way to break up the tedium, to exhale a little in those waning days in the
tense, static city. But she would not pose for a full session, the hours I
needed to paint her properly; and when I finally had stretched a canvas and set
up an easel and had paints at hand, so that the next time the mood stuck her I
would be ready, the mood ceased to strike. Anyway things were beginning to
move, to come unstuck for the final convulsion. Charles was talking over the
radio, we had to hush him, DeGaulle was speaking, calling for new elections, a
victory I should have thought but Charles for once saw it clearly, It’s all
over if he can do that, they’ll return him for sure, he said, fists clenched,
he represents stability, order, everything they want, my father always voted
CGT but he’ll vote for DeGaulle now like every other petty bourgeois, it’ll be
a massacre, it’s all over if we can’t seize the moment. He stood up. I have to
go to the Sorbonne, now, we have to organize,
we
have
to show them. He held out his hand, invitation to a dream. Distracted, smiling
a little, M took it and stood beside him. They looked at me.

I’ll catch up with you, I
said. I have some things to do first.

Let’s go, Charles said to
M.

Feverish, as if I were the
dreamer. I worked at the canvas, all the rest of that day, the sketches and
drawings surrounding me offering different angles, moods, movement almost, like
film stills, a few frames, enough to complete—I hoped—a gesture. The radio
played in the background, news reports,
the
announcer
speaking rapidly of events as they unfolded in the city, the marches and
countermarches, the new brawls. Outside my window it was
quiet,
a gentle early summer breeze came through the open windows. I worked. My
palette was basic: black for the police, heavy browns for the secret earth, dark
green for the jungles of Vietnam, ashy gray for the sands of Algeria, into
which murky death-haunted colors intruded life in the form of a little pink, a
dab of light brown, a very little vermillion. A figure assembled itself, I
preserved the panel effect, a touch of superannuated Cubism, why not, odalisque
at length, discarded caryatid, the canvas large, nearly two meters at its base,
one arm crooked out at the elbow to support the head, delicate smear of her
face, black hair torque upward, reap the whirlwind.
All day.
At some point near dusk I stood back from it, looking with disbelief at the
liberated canvas, its jagged energy, like a tunnel into something, raw,
ungainly, anatomically irregular, unfinished, but I knew if I touched it with
the brush again something would give, I’d lose the painting, lose M. I lay down
to close my eyes for a few minutes, exhausted, to regroup, when they opened
again it was night, the streetlights burned through the windows, and there was
a low sound outside, unlullling reverberate roar, like the sea. I got up,
looked out.